ECR-O: Extended Coherence Reflex — Optics Photon Chain of Custody as a Unified Pipeline Coherence Framework

Optical imaging systems transform photon signals through a multi-stage pipeline — wavefront, sensor, analog-to-digital conversion, storage, transfer, interpretation, and output. Each stage introduces potential drift. Current literature addresses individual stages in isolation: cascaded linear models handle sensor-stage noise propagation but do not span the full pipeline; adaptive optics methods correct wavefront aberrations but hand off at the aperture; image forensics evaluates output-stage physics-consistency as binary classification. To the author's knowledge, no published framework composes a continuous coherence score across all pipeline stages simultaneously. ECR-O addresses this gap by applying the published EOS/ECR operator family to optical information systems. It defines a Photon Chain of Custody: a six-stage measurement architecture in which each stage is interrogated by a Reflex Loop and scored by a normalized coherence metric C (0–1). Stage scores compose multiplicatively into a total pipeline coherence score, correctly modeling entropy accumulation. A Python simulation scaffold demonstrates Stage 2 coherence behavior, showing that C tracks loss of spatial coherence under stochastic perturbation with a predictable, thresholdable degradation profile. Part of the Extended Coherence Reflex (ECR) framework family, built on the Emergent Order Systems (EOS) theoretical substrate. Independent researcher publication.